IMHO, "Time" describes relativity of time: kids can run around and play for an hour. To grown-ups, an hour is as fast as blinking an eye, but to a kid an hour of building castles in the sand is like a couple of days. I think we're experiencing time again as if we were six years old. (Sorry if I'm posting something someone else has said already. I followed the forum up to page 17 or so, but catching up will take, like, forever?)

She's hiding behind the wall, which despite appearances must be a couple of feet high - of course, one thing we can't tell from this is the underlying beach level.

I recall a few dozen pages ago someone mooting the possibility of a real life recreation of this - oh my, they're really going to have their work cut out and would probably need a small army of helpers to get the complex constructed before the tide turned (unless they built it above the high water line using sand from below it)

Oh LOLLLLL - patzer, I have just noticed the TheMulattoMaker quote in your sig. HILARIOUS. Amazing. Love it

mittfh wrote:

SWuh wrote:NINJA'D <snip>

She go away?

She's hiding behind the wall, which despite appearances must be a couple of feet high - of course, one thing we can't tell from this is the underlying beach level.

I recall a few dozen pages ago someone mooting the possibility of a real life recreation of this - oh my, they're really going to have their work cut out and would probably need a small army of helpers to get the complex constructed before the tide turned (unless they built it above the high water line using sand from below it)

Yeah, perhaps the first 125 frames are do-able, but after that it is gonna take some doing (and I don't even think we've seen the biggest and best of it yet!!)

I have to admit, I did almost say "I'm almost at the 08:30 panel here, which panel are you near?"Calling now 17NP doesn't seem too hard to do. Just double the time, right? I can manage that ... also I like knowing you're 10NP behind me rather than five hours. Makes me feel more zen.

I'm on UTC*-14NP, myself.

* Coordinated Universal Time, natch. The comic is universal!

P.S. I am Randall, but not that Randall.We can rebuild it. We have the technology. We can make it better than it was. Better … stronger … well, maybe not faster.Well, BlitzGirl is experiencing a bit of a title wave.

foilman wrote:Sloping down now... are they perhaps on an island? An island where they have nothing to do other than build sandcastles to pass the time?

It looks to me more like a place where the sand has been piled up for the castle, but not squared off into walls or towers yet.

P.S. I am Randall, but not that Randall.We can rebuild it. We have the technology. We can make it better than it was. Better … stronger … well, maybe not faster.Well, BlitzGirl is experiencing a bit of a title wave.

I've got the best advice for this. Choose a screen name that nobody else would ever by caught dead with. That way anything insulting coming your way looks pretty minor in comparison.

Quite. I've been accused of being not all there. Well, er... yes. That was rather the point.

The one true comic now has a corner to itself on my second monitor. But I was doing some work during the last update and missed it happening.

I once knew a chap who used the screen name "alucard" (hint: spell it backwards).

As for mine, it's an acronym. I haven't discovered anyone else using it yet, so chances are a web search on it will only reveal my trail of destruction across the 'net over the past twelve years (plus the acronym's expansion at one location)

I really hope the Game of Thrones theory is not true.It's not that I would mind a direct and amusing comic about the new season, even if it's a financed one. But a commercial teaser this long without us knowing it's a commercial, would be annoying.So I'm hoping this one is about a day at the beach, a friendly sandcastle competition and maybe a mathematical calculation about the number of grains of sand that were not harmed during the making of this comic.

Looks like I was likely right about that being transformed into a wall or something.

P.S. I am Randall, but not that Randall.We can rebuild it. We have the technology. We can make it better than it was. Better … stronger … well, maybe not faster.Well, BlitzGirl is experiencing a bit of a title wave.

So she's still there, working on it. Nice. That's what I was hoping to see, although the downward slope doesn't seem to be turning into the massive pit I predicted.

Also I LOVE the countdown timer but I set it to LOUD so that I wouldn't miss the new panels but happened to already be staring at the comic this time and actually jumped out of my skin - maybe there is a healthy medium somewhere?

daef wrote:i wonder if anyone has already tried to determine "local-time" in the strip(or are they on a planet where they've never got to sleep?)

and the next thing, if not even the first thing, would be to determine thetime-factor between local-time and newpix... (or does 1NP equal halfan hour for megan&cue too?)

best-case: 1NP==30mins and we can determine local time - then wecould map time to space (-> timezonediscussion) so we could find outwhere on earth (if it's earth at all) the sandcastle is built.

wouldn't wonder if randall payd attention to that...

so long

See this is where it is frustrating for us.

To us 1NP is always, has always and I assume will always be 30 minutes (since that is the rate at which we have thus far been receiving new pics). To cueball and Megan, it's variable, it seems. Sometimes it seems like the time difference between frames is a mere second (the movement of a head, or a hand), and others it seems closer to a few minutes (the crenelating and general building of the castle). Other times it is about 10-30 seconds (walking down to the shore and back up again) and at others it is completely indeterminable (the initial 'sitting/lying/chilling at the beach' phase. The 'lone castle' phase).

So simply put, I think this comic is carefully crafted so that we do not know the passage of time within it. Quite smart, really.

Phew, just caught up. By the way, i think we should rid ourselves of all Outsider-thinking by coining a new term for what They call "Sleep". The Creator himself has helped us in comic #203 to coin the new verb, "to coma", with "coma" as the present tense and "comad" as the past, and with the future tense (which all verbs need!) still to be decided.

Helper wrote:There is a large silicate-based piece of translucent material behind me that supposedly allows one to view the Outside, although I have never cared to look through it.

Magnap wrote:Phew, just caught up. By the way, i think we should rid ourselves of all Outsider-thinking by coining a new term for what They call "Sleep". The Creator himself has helped us in comic #203 to coin the new verb, "to coma", with "coma" as the present tense and "comad" as the past, and with the future tense (which all verbs need!) still to be decided.

I have just tried to explain to 2 colleagues in Germany that I got up 4 newpix early today (although I used the Outside vernacular for the passage of Time) in order to catch up on a webcomic that updates every newpix and the discussion thread about it. They seemed confused.